£800 pm on groceries for a family

[popsickle555]

recently had a conversation with my DM (lighthearted) but I explained our weekly shop is now around £200 for a family of 2 adults and two teenage children during summer school holidays. She said she thought me ‘overspending’.

Anyway here’s what we spend:

£150 ish weekly shop (has to be weekly during the holidays as they eat so much)
£50 on top up shops fruit and veg and occasional extras eg wash powder and such things. This also includes cat food (1 cat on cheap food).

this includes lunches for me and DH (wfh) and also packed lunch stuff for DC’s who have been on a drama camp.

AIBU to think it’s actually quite hard to eat reasonably well (I do cook most days and I am buying decent ish ingredients but also plenty of ‘basic’ range options) for less than this sort of price now for 4 full portion people eating 3 meals a day? We hardly ever eat out unless on holiday.

For reference my DM hardly eats a lot now she’s older and when she does it’s really simple and generally quite boring stuff eg omelette, jacket potato etc. My DH and DCs needs more protein than that as are all very active.

I just came away feeling like I’m wasting money but genuinely can’t see how I can do it for much less without really scrimping on ingredients and protein.

i spend less
there are 3 adults in our house though and a dog.
according to my spreadsheet i spend about £500
a lot of beans and lentils though
i guess if you want to spend the amount you do, and eat the food you do, that is your prerogative

How much food is going in the bin? How much of what you buy could be home made? Biscuits, cake etc.
How much of it is empty calories like crisps?
If the answer to all of those is none and you can afford it. Carry on.

We spend around £140-£160 per week i would say. Family of 6. Two adults, children 5 to 14. We cook mostly from scratch and that includes packed lunches and snacks etc. If we bought more I think it'd end up being wasted. We don't eat much meat tho. We have fish and the kids have chicken. DH and I don't eat meat. Maybe that helps keep the cost down.

4 adults here 2 dogs and someone who I just buy milk and daily pizza for .
I'm constantly stressing that I'm spending to much on food
We are vegan and they want the vegan chocolate and cake and stuff and fizzy cans
So I'm around £1000 a month on food and I buy what ever brand is on offer ,always trying to save money with supermarkets own brand to.i hate that I spend this much on food ,it seems obscene to me

These are the dishes I cook that I have marked as both low cost and tasty. You can probably locate some of the books from their titles. Hope it helps.

.... oops

i am the same
buying in season fruit, ie plums, english apples, picking blackberries
frozen berries for breakfast
although am buying kiwis currently, i dont think they are exotic

One thing I found when I had teenagers at home was that whatever I bought they scoffed/ drank the lot and then expected it to be topped up.
I realised that I felt uncomfortable having an empty fridge towards the end of the week but this is just marketing and actually its a healthier way to live.
I stopped buying juice/ junk cereal and restricted the amount of snacks .
" once they are gone they are gone"
Bread always available for toast.

They then became much more interested in what was for dinner !
Even if he was working late my eldest DS would ask me to keep him dinner and they became much more inventive regarding lunches as a result.

yes i have a bad habit, of eek, we have run out or running out of peanut butter, for example
and then rushing off to the shops !

rather than - meh, add it to the shopping list and buy it when I am doing the main weekly shop

i used to encourage apple eating,
encourage the eating of bananas

hungry?
have a banana, fills you up, nutritious and healthy and contains potassium, unlike the bag of crips/biscuit

Hot, dry weather can improve quality but decrease yield for some fruit & veg. Or they may have to use irrigation which increases costs.

AIUI All over Europe labor shortages and cost increases have affected produce prices.

The UK is generally considered to have one of the most competitive supermarket sectors. Without that, prices would be even higher.

US, Canada, Australia have distance to factor in. Yes, wages are higher, but food costs relative to income are going up. Canada and Australia also have less competitive supermarket sectors. the US is not as competitive as the UK but not as bad as Canada, where Loblaws has something like 60% market share in grocery. (Edit: BBC says 60% but another source says 30% and I don't know how they're calculating it so differently! It's definitely dominant: there's been protests. Also, there is no Aldi or Lidl in Canada.) Coles and Woolworths are often called a duopoly in Australia.

This is the reality of spending £250 or less a month on food for 2 adults. I have 2.5 hours free electricity from the Ovo Powermove challenge. I'll be using it to turn these ingredients from the cupboards/garden into an Apple crumble, split pea soup and a soya chunks curry. The bag of peppers was free on Lidl rewards. The apples were free windfalls. I grew the garlic, onions and beans. Spices and tomato puree and oil are in the cupboards.

I have the time to do it. Busy families with working parents don't always have the time and it's a waste of no one wants to eat what is cooked.

It really annoys me when people my age and older.start the "stop buying meal kits, berries and avocado then you'll have the house deposit". Do the best can can with the budget and time available. The worst expense is wasted food.

I just looked at my Tesco bill and realized it is so high mainly because of fruit and veg!

I get plums, nectarines, bananas, apples, cherry tomatoes, sugar snap peas and a mango every week. That comes to £13 for one person!

it is also more expensive to live alone. I try to monies food waste - but, for example, pre prepared mashed potatoes for a single serving is £1. The two person pack is £1.20!

100 g of meat....is that a sausage each? Sorry I have to convert back to Imperial....500 g is a lb. So a lb of mince say for a family bolognaise? Bulked out with veg and lentils.

I do all this bulking out and adding and economising but it's tedious and repetative.

“Hatred” is not saying that a majority of voters in older age brackets voted for Brexit: that’s just fact. Perhaps the real “hatred” was the people who were more concerned with alarmist nonsense about “our borders” (as directly exemplified in posts on this thread), rather than on whether they were making a sensible economic decision

I'm "older" I never once for a milli second fell for all the Brexit nonsense. It was about fear and skin colour, plain and simple.

I have slogged all my life, and continue to slog. Bloody ridiculous.

If you add any dietary needs into the mix the bills start to jump, as well. DH & I both take GLP-1s for diabetes and hence need higher protein diets. 100g of meat wouldn't work. Anything that lowers the proportion of inexpensive carbohydrates to bulk out the meal gets expensive quite quickly.

I know, especially in M & S, this doesn’t sound possible! I’d like to do my weekly shop there too .

It's your maths that's off, mine is £80/week less 🤷

USA has a far better coupon/offers sustem and their petrol and housing prices are much lower. I lived there for 6 years. My money deffo went further over there than ig ever has in the uk

when she does it’s really simple and generally quite boring stuff eg omelette, jacket potato etc. My DH and DCs needs more protein than that as are all very active.

The vast majority of people in the west eat more protein than they need.

I do think older people forget how much younger people eat and lose touch with costs. But i think you could do it for less if you had to. I have a "basket" saved that is my Cheap Week shop. I can do it from sainsburys for under £100. It includes fresh veg and fruit, and meat several days a week. Lunches are pretty boring - sandwiches with things like cheese, ham, egg. The only "treats" are things you bake, there's no crisps/junk food, sweets, or fizzy drinks. You have to treat it like a challenge.

No one ever shares receipts on these threads.

I don’t think they are being purposefully misleading but I do think some people round down and exaggerate what they get for the money without realising, then they don’t have the receipts (in every sense of the word) to actually back it up so just disappear, So ‘I got a week’s shopping for £60 for four, all fresh, lots of decent meat and cooked from scratch’ is sometimes more like ‘here is a cherry-picked week we used a bunch of freezer and cupboard stuff we already had, we were out/somewhere else for dinner two nights and did beans on toast another night, didn’t include lunches and we topped up twice at the local shop during the week’.

I don’t think a lot of people actually realise how much they spend really until you sit down and log it week to week. Popping into the local shop for ‘milk and bread’ top-ups can often end up in £20-30.

My maths isn't off unless yours is also for 4 people. You mentioned 3 people in your post? Spending £40 per person? If you're spending that on 4 people then that is indeed cheap but your post implies your only spending for 3?

Hence me wondering how comparatively the OP spending just £10 per person more was considered steep?

Erm, none of these crops appreciated a warmer dryer summer than usual.

potatoes, onions, carrots, lettuce, broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, peas, broad beans, and maize

Its not looking good either for anyone who relies on hay to feed their animals in winter time.

I make a spaghetti bolognese with 1kg of meat. I don't bulk it out with lentils but i do add tinned tomatoes, carrots, celery, onion and one of the small containers of pancetta.

It makes 10-12 portions. We are big eaters - DH and DS do a lot of sport. 100g of meat per person is enough, people forget there is protein in lots of other things.

It doesn't mean eating loads of white carbs to bulk out, veg is better. We try and do lots of filling root veg.

Buying seasonal stuff is usually cheaper and not buying pre cut tropical fruit saves too.

Ah yes, good old value mince.